Wendy Lecker: Connecticut reform mirrors failings of New York's

Published 2:44 pm, Friday, May 18, 2012

On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg admitted that he financed Michelle Rhee's over-half-million-dollar campaign to push Governor Malloy's education bill in Connecticut.

Bloomberg instituted many of the same policies pushed by Governor Malloy and his allies, including increasing charter schools and the takeover of struggling schools. How has that fared in New York?

The Schott Foundation for Public Education, which investigates inequities in American public education, recently released a report concluding that, under Mayor Bloomberg, "New York City has consistently promoted policies that systematically lock out most of its student population from an opportunity to learn." According to the authors, Bloomberg's reforms are tantamount to educational redlining, forcing poor children and children of color into underfunded, lower-performing schools with an inexperienced teaching force plagued by high turnover.

The study found that districts with higher poverty rates had fewer experienced teachers and less-stable teaching staffs. The report revealed that New York City spends 19 percent more on education of children in its most prosperous neighborhoods than it does for children from the city's poorest neighborhoods. Students in poorer neighborhoods also have little chance of being considered for the city's elite programs.

Instead of reducing inequities, Bloomberg's policies exacerbate them.

Like New York, Connecticut's municipalities are intensely segregated. Connecticut's wealthy, mostly white communities have well-resourced, high-performing schools and stable teaching forces. By contrast, Connecticut's poorest communities also host Connecticut's most impoverished and struggling schools. As a result, Connecticut's poor children and children of color have fewer educational opportunities than their white, affluent counterparts.

Given these similarities, it is interesting to contrast Schott's recommendations with Connecticut's new education law.

The pervasive theme running through Schott's recommendations is adequate resources. The report stresses that the school funding formula must be fully funded, consistent with New York's successful school funding lawsuit (which I worked on as staff attorney at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity). It recommends directing additional resources, on a non-competitive basis, according to student need, so those schools with needier students receive more. The recommendations stress that every school must have educational, health and social services to provide to children.

How does Connecticut's new law stack up against these child-centered recommendations?

Connecticut's school funding formula has been broken for years. The Connecticut Supreme Court in the pending Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (CCJEF) school funding case ruled that the state must provide schools with resources that enable every child to participate in our democratic institutions, obtain gainful employment, contribute to our economy and go on to higher education. A cost study in this case demonstrated that Connecticut's school funding system has deprived its schools of a billion dollars in basic school funding. Our poorest districts are the hardest hit.

Yet this legislation not only ignores the flaws in the school funding system, it exacerbates them. Rather than guaranteeing that our poorest schools will have resources they need, the law makes any funding increase to these districts conditional. The money goes directly to the education commissioner, who will dole it out only if the district will meet conditions he deems appropriate. To make matters worse, the conditional increase is so small for these districts, at most $200 per student, that even if the district agrees to the conditions, the increase will likely not pay for them. So the poorest districts will then be losing money.

A legislator admonished me that the state "won't be handing out any more blank checks." This comment reveals a breathtaking disregard for Connecticut's Constitution. It is the state's affirmative obligation to provide every school with sufficient resources to provide every child with a quality education. Dangling a conditional and insufficient sum in front of deprived school districts makes a mockery of this constitutional guarantee.

The Legislature apparently has no problem handing out blank checks to privately run charter schools. Charter schools, serving 1 percent of Connecticut's public school students, get a $2,100 per-pupil increase over the next three years, guaranteed, no conditions, no taxpayer oversight.

Instead of dealing with the most pressing issue facing our schools, legislators enacted mostly pseudo-reforms that will have little to no impact in the classroom.

There is one ray of hope, coincidentally also emanating from New York. Debevoise and Plimpton, a prestigious New York law firm, signed on to represent the CCJEF plaintiffs free of charge, a burden previously borne by a clinic at Yale Law School. With this new legal power, we can be optimistic that Connecticut, one way or another, will finally be forced to face its constitutional obligation to provide all of its children with a quality public education.